Paediatric burn injuries – retrospective evaluation of applied therapeutic management

Introduction
Each year, nearly 1% of the world population suffers from burn injuries. However, thermal injuries most often occur in children.

Aim of the study
Burn treatment should consider both local treatment and prevention of existing systemic disturbances. Frequency and importance of the problem requires a revision and optimisation of the existing therapeutic schemes applied for paediatric burns, which constitutes the purpose of this study.

Material and methods
A retrospective analysis was performed on treatment of 310 paediatric patients hospitalised for burns in the years 2010–2017.

Results
In the studied period, 310 patients were hospitalised for burns; the majority of them (66.8%, 207 patients) were boys. In most cases, hospitalisation was required by children between the first and third year of life (71.9%, 223 patients). The main cause of burn injuries was contact with hot liquid (98.1%, 304 patients), primarily in the upper body part. The majority of the patients required only conservative treatment, while split-thickness skin graft (STSG) was performed in 9% of patients. Early introduction of surgical treatment accelerated wound healing and normalisation of systemic disturbances and correlated with reduced length of stay (p = 0.0019). No prevalence of any of the applied professional dressings on the wound healing rate was observed. Substantially, all children required multidrug pain therapy. A low rate of analgesic administration at the pre-hospitalisation stage was recorded.

Conclusions
The vast majority of the patients required only conservative treatment, although the need for introducing surgery should be considered as early as at the first treatment stage. The current condition of burn wound with particular focus on exudation rate and presence of eschar should be the key criterion for the selection of dressing.